Now, another kind of camp would be making room on local maps. Two weeks into my 10-day stay, the promised Hezbollah-sponsored march finally took place. On Friday, Dec. 1, one-million March 8 supporters descended on Martyr’s Square in central Beirut. People came from across the small country, and tents and portable sanitation facilitates were set up. By the afternoon, the center of the city looked like a Shi‘a version of Woodstock. Once again, everyone knew—but no one said—what havoc a single well-placed sniper or suicide bomber could wreak.

By now, the city was dizzy from holding its breath for so long. I was dizzy, and I had only been there a couple of weeks.
I’m not sure why, but the idea of political protest usually implies angry mobs. No one, it seems, told this to the Lebanese. As the square filled to far beyond capacity, it seemed more of a festival than a demand for the present government
to resign. Impromptu stages and sound systems were set up, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the central district waving flags, singing, chanting anti- government slogans. If only they would all stop smiling so much while they were doing it.

Given the proximity of thousands of so far peaceful protesters to the odd sandwich shop, which happened to also have shelves upon shelves of booze lining the walls, many of the local Lebanese police and armed forces took to hanging out at Makhlouf’s, our standby food supply near the hotel. When the March 14 sit-in began, the usually quiet local shop became an improvised military command post and mess tent. Suddenly our meals were taken sitting in the thick of officers, soldiers and policemen whose unenviable task it was to maintain order. It wasn’t long before we got to know them on a first-name basis. Suddenly the constantly shifting security checkpoints became easier to pass, and nights were usually spent bouncing between the Hezbollah camps up the street, military command posts, Makhlouf’s or the campfires of the Lebanese military tucked away in parking lots or backyards of burnt out buildings.

That kind of thing can give you the bends. Though very few people I’ve met can resist using the word “surreal” when discussing Beirut, I didn’t fully realize how bent this particular case of the bends was making me, and I suppose, Andreas and Doyon as well. And this was barely the beginning of the third week.

Lebanon’s mix of 17 denominations and even more political and ideological groundings has often been blamed for the country’s travails. To be sure, there were tense moments, no doubt on a daily basis, but this time, the differences served to keep things from spilling into complete anarchy once again.

The unofficial figures point out that 70 percent of the military is Shi‘a. But being in the military often subverts one’s civilian life; it’s designed to make your country and your platoon a social circle, family, employer and authority. It wouldn’t be easy, however, to incite troops to fire on crowds, and hasn’t been in the days since the standoff began. They were, not so long ago, part of those crowds; after fulfilling their service, they would return to the same streets they were patrolling.

The people who have something to lose these days stand behind the government for the most part, while those with little or nothing to lose look for the masses camped out downtown to reset the system and level the playing field. This goes to show how little has changed over the centuries despite media and analysts claiming that an Islamist/fundamentalist revolution is brewing in Lebanon, or finger pointers blaming foreign influence (take your pick: the U.S./Israeli axis or the Syrian/Iranian/Hezbollah) for using Lebanon as their chessboard.

The rush of being in Lebanon these days was partly due to the scent of an unbridled sense of democracy. Not the prepackaged made-for-export version, but the kind that rose from the ashes of anarchy and war and didn’t know quite what to make of itself. Which, naturally, made it a very dangerous time as well. There was no rulebook to refer to. The country had leveled itself to the ground so often that any real sense of precedence or political protocol had to be reinvented on a monthly and sometimes daily basis.
This worried countries that had invested in Lebanon for various and often self-serving reasons over the past century.

Stalemate

Naturally the euphoria of the first days of protests couldn’t last. In the first nights of the sit-in at Martyr’s Square, there were well-mannered Hezbollah security plainclothes walking around making sure order was kept. Half-hearted brawls, young kids trying to smuggle alcohol in on their first-ever camping trip, and other unruly elements were kept in check. That utopian edge soon gave way to a diminishing number of campers, more often than not from the Palestinian camps and poorer villages; street kids with little else to do but congregate and be angry over the appalling dish their lives had served up. I should have realized things were turning odd when I saw fewer adults and more shebab (youth).

It sank in on a deeper lever when I could no longer keep track of how many of these kids asked me, the adult foreigner, if I could go to the liquor store and get them vodka, or if I were interested in buying some cocaine or hash.